Tuesday, July 24, 2012

All the Pleasures of Time and Leisure

Since owning my own laptop I have been introduced to the joys of electronic books, and since I also have a huge selection of music on there as well I have been combining the two for a couple of years now. It just makes more sense (to me) to combine the two (because there just isn't enough time in a day to do either separately) though I know that most people do not like to do this claiming that the music or the reading would be too distracting of the other. I beg to differ. Admittedly, before I even considered doing such things, there was always music in my head... like my life has it's own soundtrack, wherever I go and whatever I do, if it's just walking early in the morning and watching the sun come up, driving along the highway to and from Terrace (a very beautiful drive any time of the year), working, cleaning, quilting, writing. It's never really quiet in my head, so I've never had any problems incorporating the two.

Before I even had my laptop I noticed the enhancement of my pleasure of listening while reading, my first experience being some Heinlein juveniles, whilst listening to the Flaming Lips' Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robot. The Rolling Stones were never so good as when I was listening over and over again to Aproaching Pavonis Mons by Balloon.
I strongly recommend reading some thrilling space opera to the music of The Flaming Lips as their genre, while being stated as alternative is really space music of the finest calibre.

Next to make a great impression was a selection of space music from Hearts of Space, a radio program out of Berkeley, California featuring the best of electronic and classical music with a spacey theme. One such piece resonated with me while reading book two of Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet (a truly sad story of love and pain in Mormon America). Adagio to Silence was so invocative, I could not help but be overwhelmed with sorrow and compassion for the protagonists of this side story with a perfect selection of Mahler, Kitaro, Messiaen, Landowski, Stearns and Tempel. Have a look at their website... there is lots there to enjoy. Hearts of Space

The pairing of Tanya Huff's Blood Books with the last two albums by U.N.K.L.E Where Did the Night Fall and Another Night Out. A terrific co-operation of Sleepy Sun, Katrina Ford, Gavin Smith, The Black Angels, Autolux, Gavin Clark and the awesomeness of U.N.K.L.E. Perfection!

Another truly significant and well mated couple is The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov joined with Dmitri Shostakovich's neo-classical string quartets. I don't think I could ever separate the two now from each other, both being so integral to the power of the story each tell.Master is a very creepy, sinister book with a fascinating story within a story within yet another story. I stongly recommend using this combination of music to story.

This year's serendiptious pairing was The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick being well met with the French electronica band Air's soundtrack to the Georges Méliès film Le Voyage Dans Le Lune (the album having the same name).

As you can see there are quite a lot of choices out there for this kind of reading, and I promise to share some of those perfect combinations that I manage to stumble upon while working through my collections of books and music. Of course, in the future we will have holographic novels which will have all the senses engaged whilst reading/watching the story... so this concept really isn't that far off eh?